Some 15 million right-wing Christians are thought to have voted for George W. Bush in 2004, and Bush's strategists say he must raise that to 19 million if he wants to win in 2004. Who are the "Religious Right" and how did they get so powerful?

How religious are Americans?

Very. More than 90% profess belief in God, and 75% cite a specific religious allegiance. But what is known as the "Religious Right" has little to do with mainstream religion. Indeed, many religious leaders are deeply worried about its influence on politics and its hold on the Republican Party: no Republican supporter of evolutionary biology, biotech research, abortion or gay rights today stands a chance of becoming president or vice-president.

What do they believe?

The hard core are apocalyptic Christians who believe that the Second Coming is nigh and that they will be snatched up into the air to meet Jesus in an epiphany known as "the Rapture". (Falwell delivers gloating sermons describing the plane crashes and car wrecks that will occur as the redeemed are lifted from their driving seats.) But this won't happen until the state of Israel has been established within its "biblical lands" and the Third Temple is rebuilt on the site now occupied by the al-Aqsa mosque which is why Christian conservatives provide Israel with its strongest support in the US. Pollsters say some 18% of voters hold such beliefs and 33% of Republicans, among them John Ashcroft, the attorney general, several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay.

What brought the Right together?

After the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential elections, a small group of Republicans, headed by Paul Weyrich, decided the party had to expand beyond its traditional base. So they began to target fundamentalist, Pentecostal and charismatic churches whose followers had traditionally been apolitical, but who were fed up with the liberal drift of mainstream politics. In 1979 the group engaged fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell to set up an organisation called the Moral Majority. Falwell's motto was: "get them saved, get them baptised, and get them registered." Thousands of preachers, many from the Southern Baptist Convention - the US's largest Protestant denomination with 42,000 churches and 16 million members received political training. Within a year the Moral Majority claimed to have signed up three million first-time voters.

What has been their political strategy?

The initial emphasis was on getting people to vote Republican. In 1976 the Democrat Jimmy Carter, a genuine praising the Lord evangelical, secured 66% of the white Baptist vote. But, when he ran for re-election four years later, a massive shift had occurred and 64% of that vote went to the Republican Ronald Reagan (a divorce who obligingly declared in 1980 that the Bible held all the answers to the world's problems). Yet in office Reagan did little to push the policies of Christian groups relying instead on their shared hatred of Communism - and their leaders began to feel betrayed by a "country club" Republican elite more interested in tax breaks than the Bible. (George Bush Sr, with his prevarications on tax and abortion, was particularly loathed.) So in 1988, a fundamental-ist minister called Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network - one of the largest in the world – decided to run for the Republican presidential nomination.

What happened to Robertson?

He came nowhere, but with the contacts he made during the race, and with an organizing genius called Ralph Reed (now chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in the Southeast) he founded the Christian Coalition, dedicated to lobbying for a Christian Right agenda and ensuring the election of like-minded candidates. The new strategy was to run candidates for local school boards, town councils and all the other local elected offices for which few bother to vote; and to control these institutions, and local Republican party organizations, with as little as 10% of the eligible vote. "Our aim," said Robertson "is to gain dominion over society." By 1994 the Coalition had distributed 40 million copies of the Family Values Voter's Guide. That year, though Clinton won, Republicans gained control of both Houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years and made huge gains in State Legislatures.

What policies do they support?

The ultimate political goal – at variance with the separation of church and state defined in the US Constitution, is to make America a Christian nation, ruled according to Biblical principles. The agenda includes outlawing abortion, ostracizing homosexuals, teaching creationism and sexual abstinence in schools, and introducing school prayers. But the movement attracts many white middle-class families whose primary concerns are such issues as immigration, tax, and the loss of traditional values. So much of the agenda is less religious than Right. A good illustration can be seen in the motions recently passed at the Republican Party convention in Harris County, Texas (George Bush's political heartland): homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; inheritance, capital gains, income and corporation tax should be abolished; immigrants should be deterred by electric fences.

How strong are they today?

Christian conservatives now hold a majority of seats in 18 out of 50 Republican state committees, plus large minorities in 81 % of the rest, double their strength from a decade before. (They are strongest in the South and the Midwest and weakest in the north eastern coastal states.) At national level the Coalition monitors the performance of members of Congress and on last count the top seven ranking Republicans in the Senate all scored 100% (i.e. always voted for Coalition positions). Yet despite their strong showing in Congress, the Religious Right has not been very successful at changing public policy.

The Influence of Zealotry on US Politics

One place where Christian groups have had an impact has been on the language of politicians: Bush, for example, peppers his speeches with coded religious references. Another has been on sexual standards in public life: the hounding of Clinton over Monica Lewinsky was at least in part inspired by the disgust of his religious opponents. The impact on domestic policy is less obvious, though the bans on therapeutic cloning (legal in Europe) and stem cell research followed intense pressure from Christian groups. Yet on many of its chosen issues, including a federal ban on homosexual marriage and the introduction of a Religious Freedom amendment to rescind the constitutional separation of church and state, the Christian Right has so far made little headway.

However it can claim to have influenced foreign policy, the Middle East in particular. In 2002, when Bush asked Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again. But the main target of the Religious Right, if Bush is re-elected, will be the Supreme Court, where it hopes to see the two or three liberal judges due soon to retire replaced with ultra-conservative ones.

10 July 2004 THE WEEK